All About the Foster 50 Challenge (2025)

PLEASE NOTE: This episode is from the 2025 Foster 50 Challenge, so some details and timing are out of date. For information on the 2026 Foster 50 Challenge, visit PEDIGREEFoundation.org/Foster50.

Welcome to the Foster 50 Challenge! Thank you for joining us on this important journey to grow your foster network programming. In our first episode, you’ll hear real talk about what actually works to build a foster program that scales and sustains. We’ll also discuss the important checkpoints of the Foster 50 program to prepare you for grant submission timing and for our national consumer launch to drive foster participation to your organization.

While all shelters and rescue organizations were invited to participate in the free trainings and access to online resources and Foster 50 podcast, grants are only open to organizations within the continental United States. In addition, shelter and rescue organizations in Puerto Rico that are 501(c)3 may also apply for one of the PEDIGREE Foundation grants.

Later this month we will be formally announcing Foster 50 nationwide. As part of this announcement, we’ll be driving pet parents to a page on PEDIGREEFoundation.org where they can learn more about how to foster, how to prepare for fostering, and what shelters and rescues in their area are participating in Foster 50.

HOSTS: Kristen Hassen, Principal, Outcomes Consulting
               Kelly Duer, Senior Shelter Solutions Specialist, Maddie's Fund

GUEST: Sarah Aguilar, Director, Santa Barbara County Animal Services 

LINKS:

• Learn more about the 2026 Foster 50 Challenge and sign up
• Comprehensive Foster Recruitment Plan
• Fostering Connections: A Guide to Strengthening Volunteer & Foster Programs
• Foster resource collections 
• How to pilot a program
• Super charge your foster program with these 7 guiding principles (5 min. read) 

Transcript

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Kristen Hassen 0:00

Welcome to Foster 50, the audio playbook. This is a podcast all about the Foster 50 Challenge. This is a national effort involving a number of amazing organizations coming together to put foster at the heart of shelter and rescue operations and to encourage animal shelters and rescues to grow, start, expand, innovate their foster programs. I'm Kristen Hassen. And I'm Kelly Duer. And we're going to tell you just a little bit about our backgrounds and why we're here and so excited to be hosting this podcast. I work primarily as a shelter consultant with America's largest, toughest shelters. I work with the animal shelters that take in anywhere from 10,000 to 35,000 animals a year. I have led three large open admission shelters where foster was our primary life-saving solution. And I have been lucky enough to work with Kelly Duer for more than a decade on sending medium and large adult dogs to foster homes and saving their lives, changing their lives and changing people's lives through just getting big dogs into homes. We know that in the United States, we have so much more room to expand foster as the primary solution for lost, homeless and other pets in our shelter system. So I'm grateful to be here and we're gonna be talking all about the Foster 50 Challenge, how you can get involved and telling you a little bit more about our experiences with foster care and talking about some of the great examples of animal shelters and rescues using foster.

Kelly Duer 2:06 Kelly Duer 2:06

I started in animal welfare as a foster. My job consists mainly of helping organizations build foster programs. So I help with research on foster. I help with educational materials on foster and I do some consulting and have had the immense pleasure of working with shelters throughout the US on growing their foster programs. The Foster 50 Challenge was developed by a coalition of animal welfare experts, including Pedigree Foundation, Maddie's Fund, Adopt-a-Pet, Mutual Rescue, Petco Love, the Association for Animal Welfare Advancement and Outcomes for Pets.

Kristen Hassen 2:51

Let's talk a little bit about the why we're doing this. So we know that this is a historically difficult time for animal shelters, particularly for big dogs. And when we say big, we mean anything from 30 pounds and up. Dogs that live in a regular-sized dog kennel can often be considered medium and large, but they are struggling. We are seeing an increase in euthanasia for space simply because there are too many dogs Dogs sitting in shelters, even though those dogs are loving, adoptable family pets who just need a chance at a home, and foster is the best possible solution we have. It is the safest, most effective, lowest cost solution we have to save those dogs' lives.

Kelly Duer 3:35

Research on foster programs has identified an enormous amount of benefits for pets, shelters, and rescue organizations and foster caregivers. These include, but are not limited to, lower stress levels than in a sheltered building. Increased likelihood of adoption. Pets are less likely to get sick. And when they do, they often recover more quickly than they would in the shelter. Increased social interaction and enrichment. Pets get higher quality rest than in shelters, which is important because reduced sleep quality is also linked with impulsivity, negative judgment bias, and lowered inhibition. Multiple studies have shown significant decreases in adoption returns, possibly because a foster who gets to know them personally can help make great matches.

Kristen Hassen 4:16

That is why we are going all in on the Foster 50 Challenge. And our goal is to have shelters and rescues participating in all 50 states. Kelly, can you talk a little bit about the details? How do shelters get involved? And what are shelters expected to do? Like, how do you sign up? So what is the Foster 50?

Kelly Duer 4:39

This brand new program has been designed by a coalition of animal welfare experts to help shelter and rescue organizations grow their foster programs. We all know that fostering is the single most important shelter intervention to get animals adopted, but many barriers exist that prevent organizations from hosting thriving foster programs, many of which we'll address directly. One thing organizations participating in the challenge are asked to do is to make your foster onboarding process the time from when somebody signs up to when they take a pet home, 24 hours or less. This is the first of four episodes dedicated to supporting you with your foster programming. Each week on Mondays, we'll also host live support calls or office hours to directly address questions and dive deeper into weekly topics. And we invite you to join these sessions throughout the month of May. Two of our coalition partners, Pedigree Foundation and Maddie's Fund, are also offering $50,000 in grant funding specifically for innovative foster programs that will be awarded in October. That's $100,000 in available grant funding. Grant applications open on June 3rd and close on July 31st. In June, we'll launch a national call to action to pet parents to find a participating shelter or rescue near them and try out fostering a pet. We'll include your shelter or rescue organization online at pedigreefoundation.org to drive consumer participation in fostering. Our goal is to have pet parents across the nation try fostering for the first time, re-engage foster parents who may not have fostered in a while, and ignite the pros to continue fostering all summer long. It's easy to join us in the Foster 50 Challenge by filling out the interest form online at www.pedigreefoundation.org/ foster50. Fill out the interest form by Friday, May 23rd to be a part of the program. This is where you can access all of our Foster 50 training and resource materials. And if you can't make the live support calls, all of them will be recorded and posted on the website to access at any time.

Kristen Hassen 6:34

Thanks to support from the participating organizations, we're able to be giving away grants and prizes to participants who do exceptional things during the Foster 50 period. So we're looking for innovation, expansion, growth, new ways of recruiting fosters, and we want to see the most exciting, creative things that animal shelters and rescues can do to build their foster programs. We see that foster programs are limited mainly by our own barriers that we put in place and so we're hoping to see shelters really overcome those barriers, learn from the orgs doing it best, and see their programs grow and expand. When we say foster care, we mean a whole range of things from dog day out field trips, all the way through to someone fostering a medical pet through its treatment and recovery and getting it adopted. So foster can mean a range of different opportunities for the community, but at its simplest, it's any amount of time a shelter or rescue animal is able to spend out of the shelter or rescue with a person. And so that is really what we mean. And we want to see maybe even new kinds of foster firms that we haven't seen before. Why a challenge? Because we want to inspire shelters and rescues to work together, to learn from each other. This is a competitive challenge. We're looking for the best, biggest changes, the brightest innovations, the most creative shifts, the bravest call-outs to the community to help. And so this challenge will involve shelters and rescues participating, doing something to change and expand or start their foster program. and then simply reporting back on what they did and what the impact was. Every participating shelter will be recognized, some will win prizes, and some of those will be pretty big prizes. Let's talk about what we're helping shelters do. Too often, foster programs are relegated to the land of the foster coordinator and everyone else in the organization says, I can't help you, you'll have to talk to the foster coordinator. Anytime it's anything about fostering, we really want to see a different approach with your entire organization getting involved. We would love to see animal caretakers, animal care technicians, animal control officers getting involved in getting more pets to foster. How can we involve the entire organization in foster care and start making everybody part of the solution? I'd love to see anyone in your organization be able to process a foster placement. I'd love to see animal shelters do a giant recruitment in their community for foster caregivers and to see tons of new people fostering. I'd love to see testimonials on their websites about why fostering is so important. Expanding social media to incorporate fostering to nearly every post. There's so much we can do with Foster Kelly. What do you hope to see?

Kelly Duer 9:59

I hope to see a lot of organizations who don't yet have short-term foster programs to try them out. I hope that they will also do things to improve the foster retention, working with the people that do social media and making sure that foster is being talked about all the time, that there are stories that are going out as much as possible, surveying their fosters and getting feedback from them on how they're doing and making changes to improve the program, to find volunteers who can help manage the program, because having volunteers help to manage it will take a lot of work off the foster coordinator. Here's Sarah Aguilar, director of Santa Barbara Animal Services, discussing why and how they grew their foster program when she became the shelter's director.

Sarah Aguilar 10:46

I came to Santa Barbara County a little over two years ago. And when I first got here, we were like half full. It felt like I showed up and the community was like, great, here's a bunch of you. Because within about 30 days, we hit our capacity. And we started to have some overcrowding issues. Everybody knows overcrowding just places additional stress on the animals in our care, as well as our staff and volunteers who are trying to keep up and take care of them and make sure everybody has what they need. About a year and a half ago, we had so many cats in our building that they were in pop-up crates and kennels in our lobbies because we didn't have anywhere else to put them. Animal stress, which I just mentioned. So when you have more animals, you have these longer shelter stays and that leads to increased stress. We had strain on our staff who was struggling to keep up with these growing intake numbers. And we have really limited community engagement. I'm a firm believer that people are the solutions to our problem. And we just, as an agency, we're not connecting with them to tell them what was happening and what we needed. So we saw fostering as a key way to alleviate overcrowding, provide animals with more individualized care, and involve the community in our mission. Foster programs offered flexibility, allowing people to help without the long-term commitment of adoption. This not only helped the animals, but gave our volunteers and staff a sense of purpose and relief from the daily pressures of shelter. So we saw a lot of things. You may hear lots of agencies that have large foster programs talk about this, but you see improved behavior, increased adoptions. You get far more information about the animals outside of the shelter environment. And one of the first things that we leaned into was doggy day trips. We already had foster things in place, processes and documentation and forms and things. So we added doggy day trips. As the program gained momentum, we saw more and more community members wanting to participate. We had several months this year where we've had 350 or more day trips just in that month. We have two Starbucks stores that compete against each other to see who has the most day trips each week. We have a skills development agency bringing groups of individuals with disabilities to take dogs out twice a week. We quickly expanded our numbers. We started with, you know, 10 a month, quickly we're up over 300. And this growth was largely due to this low barrier for entry. Many of them, of the people who are coming to walk dogs, don't have time to do long-term fostering or they don't have space in their home or they can't have animals. So we made it super easy for folks to walk in, sign a paper, take the dog out for the day. Another really big piece is that county administration, the board of supervisors, the county CEO, the public health department director and leadership all believe in our foster program. They've seen the successes. They've walked through shelters in other areas of California that are overcrowded. And then they walk through our shelter. And most days we have open kennels. And we've got as many animals in foster as we have in the shelter. So they understand it. They believe in it. They see it. It's very flexible. Anybody can foster for any length of time and any reason. If you have a few hours, if you have a weekend, if you have spring break, if you have six months, we'll find you a match. We're very flexible for that. And we have very low barriers to participate. We don't have background checks. I'm not doing home checks. You just show up. We do take a copy of ID that's required by our county. And then we have forms you fill out and that's it.

Kelly Duer 15:37

We have an immense amount of resources for you on the website, but just to get you started, we'll tell you about just a few of them. The first is the Foster 50 Challenge Recruitment Checklist. It is a checklist for shelter and rescue organizations that are looking to grow your foster firms. It has tons of ideas and links to resources and templates that can help you put those ideas into practice.

Kristen Hassen 15:56

Last year, we worked to create toolkits to help animal shelters follow best practices. These are on the Pedigree Foundation website. There are all kinds of toolkits. We covered everything from high-volume dog volunteer and foster programs to transport programs to increasing your adoptions to great ideas for adoption events. Gosh, back in the day, you and I worked with Dr. Sigerson and a number of brilliant folks to write seven books What was it called? The seven guiding principles. Guiding principles of high volume or the foster centric model. And the foster centric model was like, what are the seven things that you need to do? We can post this in the show notes. It's still one of my favorite resources. What are the seven things you need to do to build a foster centric model? And one of them is involve the entire organization.

Kelly Duer 16:47

We'll be connecting you with resources and giving you our personalized support during our office hours, 12pm PT, 3pm ET on Mondays in May (2025). In our next episode, we'll be talking about how you can make foster onboarding work for you. Thank you all so much for listening to today's podcast.